importchecker 1.1

What is importchecker?

Importchecker is a commandline utility to find unused imports in Python modules.

Its output is “grep-like” (and thus “emacs-friendly”), reporting both the module’s filenames and line numbers where names are imported that are not acually used in the module.

Importchecker will not modify any of the source files. Whether the import needs to be removed is left to the judgement of the developer.

Installation

The importchecker commandline utility can be installed using the easy_install command:

$ sudo easy_install importchecker

The command can then be invoked with either a directory or a Python file:

$ importchecker /path/to/a/source/tree
$ importchecker /path/to/a/source/tree/module.py

Buildout

Projects that make use of zc.buildout for development might find the following buildout.cfg. snippet useful for using the importchecker on the developed codebase:

[buildout]
...
parts = importchecker ...
...

[importchecker]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg
eggs = importchecker
arguments = "${buildout:directory}/src"

Known issues

• One source tree path argument at the time can be passed to the command line utility.

• Command line argument parsing is rather naïve.

1.1 (2012-01-09)

• Applied provided by wosc enabling running the import checker on individual python modules not just directories.

• Report the absolute path for modules when needed, relative paths (relative to the current working directory, that is) when possible.

1.0 (2008-05-06)

• Initial packaging

• Make the importchecker work on python 2.5